“What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera. ”
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish American photographer, educator, curator and writer. Over two hundred one-person and group exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide includes the recent traveling exhibition titled SAGA: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Thirty-Five Years of Photographs with venues in Massachusetts, Eastern Europe, Finland, Italy and Canada. His self-portrait photographs have been published internationally with six monographs: Frostbite (Morgan & Morgan, 1978); Waterline (Marval, Aperture, and Otava, 1994), Grand Prix du Livre at the 25th Rencontres d'Arles; Body Land (Motta, Nathan, and the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997-1999); SAGA: (Chronicle Books, 2005), Special Jury Prize at the 2nd Lianzhou International Photography Festival in China; and Homework: The Finnish Photographs, 1973 to 2008 (Like Publishing Ltd., 2008); and Swimming in the Air (Cavallo Point, 2008).
Minkkinen's works are in prominent museum and institutional collections worldwide: the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts; the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; the Musée d'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris; the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in Helsinki; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan among many others.
Minkkinen is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Docent at the University of Art & Design Helsinki, and graduate faculty at Rockport College in Rockport, Maine. Previous teaching affiliations include École d'Arts Appliqués in Vevey, Switzerland, the Lahti Design Institute in Lahti, Finland, the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Galleries representing Minkkinen's works are Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Barry Friedman Ltd. and Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, Galerie Anhava in Helsinki, Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, and SEE + Gallery in Beijing.
Nine galleries worldwide represent Minkkinen's works: Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Barry Friedman Ltd. and Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, Galerie Anhava in Helsinki, Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris, Photo & Contemporary in Torino, Galerie Valerié Bach in Bruxelles, and SEE + Art Space Gallery in Beijing.
Minkkinen's works can also be seen on Artnet's Artist's Works Catalogue pages:
www.artnet.com/awc/arno-minkkinen.html
Professor Minkkinen is also an aspiring film director and screenwriter. A feature-length film to be produced in Finland is in the works with Kimmo Koskela, co-director. Koskela directed the award-winning 1995 hour-long documentary, Still Not There , on Minkkinen's life and work for Finnish television. The film is being released on DVD in 2010 as part of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Forty Years of Photography.
In 1992, the Finnish government conferred knighthood with the First Class Order of the Lion medal. In 2006, Minkkinen was awarded the Finnish State Art Prize in Photography.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Photography
MFA, Photography
Rhode Island School of Design
BA, English
Wagner College
